“The Darkness of this Time” and Worldly Philosophy of Mind

The following is an except from a draft of the introduction to Thinking about Thinking: Mind and Meaning in the Era of Technological Nihilism.

The complete introduction can be found here. The entire book will be available soon. Stay tuned.

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.
His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom,
In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard,
In the smell of grapes on the autumn table,
And the evening circle in the winter gaslight.

----- T.S. Eliot, Thy Dry Salvages[1]

Introduction: “The Darkness of this Time” and Worldly Philosophy of Mind

Ludwig Wittgenstein prefaces his posthumously published Philosophical Investigations with a notorious bit of pessimism regarding the likelihood of its being understood very widely at all. Referring to the inquires to follow, Wittgenstein admits that “I make them public with misgivings. It is not impossible that it should fall to the lot of this work, in its poverty and in the darkness of this time, to bring light into one brain or another – but, of course, it is not likely.”[2]  Wittgenstein presented his youthful Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus with the expectation that “this book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it – or similar thoughts,”[3] but in that earlier work the source of the author’s worry is the idiosyncratic nature of the ideas he is attempting articulate. Wittgenstein does not attribute the obscurity of the Tractatus to the darkness of the times during which it is to be published. When introducing the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein again cites the “poverty” of the work itself as an obscuring factor, but, as I have emphasized, he additionally raises the specter of the “the darkness of this time” as grounds for his glum expectation that the treatise to follow will fall mostly on deaf ears. Curiously, one of the canonical works of twentieth-century philosophy, if not all of modern philosophy, is expected by its author to be mostly misunderstood, because the conditions of modernity, or at least modernity in its particularly twentieth-century manifestation, will somehow prevent its readers from a transparent view of what he is trying to say.

 Wittgenstein does nothing in his preface explicitly to clue us in to the nature or source of this obscuring darkness, but no doubt the international affairs of the interwar and wartime years during which he wrote the notes eventually published as the Philosophical Investigations made fertile grounds for gloomy expectations. Nevertheless, it is hard to see why the economic desperation and international belligerence of those times would make it unlikely that even a highly educated readership would understand a philosophical treatise. The obscuring elements Wittgenstein despairs over must, therefore, not be the dire events abroad during his generation, but something more like the cultural conditions of modernity in the twentieth century itself, and we might expect these same fundamental circumstances still to frame the experience of readers of the Philosophical Investigations today. I am doubtful that Wittgenstein would identify our times as any better illuminated than his own. In what sense, then, does Wittgenstein believe that we are in a sort of modern Dark Age?

The following remarks from some of Wittgenstein’s other writings provide hints as to what about our situation motivates his pessimistic preface.

The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves.  It isn’t absurd, e.g., to believe that the scientific and technological age is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of Great Progress is a bedazzlement, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that humanity, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are.[4]

Men have judged that a king can make rain; we say this contradicts all experience.  Today they judge that aeroplanes and the radio, etc. are means for closer contact of peoples and the spread of culture [and this contradicts all of my experience].[5]

These remarks, taken from Culture and Value and On Certainty respectively, suggest that a sort of quiet, cultural apocalypse has gone on behind the scenes of modernity; a bedazzlement by a simulacrum of truth has warped our sense of what would count as authentic solidarity in much the same way as a tyrant’s primitive subjects might become so deluded by wishful thinking as to believe that their naked emperor can control the weather by royal fiat, contrary to all of their most obvious experiences. In short, Wittgenstein fears that we have lost contact with the world unawares. Without even knowing it, we have lost the ability to see our hand before our face, and he identifies the culprit as our “technological age” that has promised us the “Great Progress.” Wittgenstein’s point is not to reject technological progress or scientific knowledge as such. Rather, he believes that our fixation on a particular conception of ourselves that comes part and parcel with technological and scientific development amounts to a spiritual cataclysm. In his view, the apocalypse has already come to pass (or, at least, we are no longer in position actually to notice the difference), so any attempt to engage in an inquiry that avails itself of a richer self-understanding will only fall on deaf ears. While the recovery of a more robust or humane relationship to the world is exactly the sort of project that Wittgenstein undertakes in the Philosophical Investigations, he is convinced that those of us left behind after this technological rapture, as it were, are quite unlikely to have a clue as to what he is even trying to achieve, because our way of thinking is structured by the technological mentality in its most fundamental assumptions. As Wittgenstein claims in these remarks, our most basic primordial and grounding experiences, for which he is attempting to assemble reminders, have been rendered opaque by technological bedazzlement. 

 Wittgenstein is not alone among 20th-century luminaries in his dire diagnosis of our shared obsession with the Great Technological Progress, and it is not only philosophers who have voiced these reservations. Max Weber famously characterizes modernity in terms of a sort of technological disenchantment of the world:

It means that in principle, then, we are not ruled by mysterious, unpredictable forces, but on the contrary, we can in principle control everything by means of calculation. That in turn means the disenchantment of the world. Unlike the savage for whom such forces existed, we need no longer have recourse to magic in order to control spirits or pray to them. Instead, technology and calculation achieve our ends. This is the primary meaning of the process of intellectualization.[6]

Of course, Weber is not one to rue the rise of modernity and its rationalization of our institutions, and indeed it is hard to take seriously anyone who claims to regret our ability to control more things “by means of calculation” with a straight face (at least not while on the way to visit to the dentist’s office, or as I write a book on a laptop). Weber, nevertheless, does not deny that technological progress has come at a great cost. With disenchantment comes a sense of homelessness and aimlessness.

Using the example of the application of medical technology for the preservation and enhancement of life, Weber worries that scientifically engineered technique has given us great power to control a newly disenchanted nature, but it cannot tell us to what end we should do so:

All natural scientists provide us with answers to the question: what should we do if we wish to make use of technology to control life? But whether we wish, or ought to control it through technology, and whether it ultimately makes any sense to do so, is something that we prefer to leave open or else take as given.[7]

In other words, the coupling of the disenchanted stance and technological progress have delivered into our hands an ever-increasing power while at the same time proportionally obscuring our sense of having an objectively determined end toward which to aim it. By this very process of “rationalization” we have disabused ourselves of the notion that nature stands as a normative corrective to our whims as we find them. That is, as nature has become disenchanted for us, and thereby more pliable to our interests, it has been lost to us as a guide to how things ought to be, and instead nature is lately taken merely how things happen to be, even if these happenings can now be predicted with high degrees of certainty and to good effect. All we can direct ourselves to, worries Weber, is an empty notion of progress for its own sake. One, however, cannot help but ask: “Progress towards what?” To that question, Weber broods, there can be no rational answer. For him, once nature has been disenchanted, reason is only an instrument that mediates between given ends and proposed means, but it can do nothing to determine those ends. All we can do is fall back onto our subjective “values” and look to the sheer power of expertise and mechanistic effectiveness. Once again, one cannot help but ask: “Effectiveness toward what?” As Alasdair McIntyre puts it, for Weber, “no type of authority can appeal to rational criteria to vindicate itself except that type of bureaucratic authority which appeals precisely to its own effectiveness. And what this appeal reveals is that bureaucratic authority is nothing other than successful power.”[8] Progress without some ultimate teleological aim, dictated to us by nature (or maybe super-nature), does not seem very much like progress at all. Moving toward nothing in particular on the authority of whim and arbitrary power is not advancement. As Weber worries, “senseless ‘progressivity’” renders both life and death pointless, because our pretensions to mastery of the world leave us clueless as to how we ought to master it. Inevitably, “civilized life” in the technological age condemns itself to meaninglessness.[9] We are then trapped in a sort of “iron cage” that bars us from seeing things as they really are, or least in a way that allows us to see them as meaningful, and locks us into self-destructive practices.[10] McIntyre, reminiscent of the apocalyptic themes in Wittgenstein we discussed above, characterizes this entrapment by techno-bureaucratic authoritarianism as a “new dark ages which are already upon us.”[11]  

Weber is not alone among cultural critics of the last century who have a gloomy estimate regarding the obscuring possibilities of our technological era. Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn claims that:

Yet it turns out that from this spasmodic pace of technological Progress, from the oceans of superficial information and cheap spectacles, the human soul does not grow, but instead grows more shallow, and spiritual life is only reduced. Our culture, accordingly, grows poorer and dimmer, no matter how it tries to drown out its decline with the din of empty novelties. As creature comforts improve for the average person, so spiritual development grows stagnant. Surfeit brings with it a nagging sadness of heart, as we sense that the whirlpool of pleasures does not bring satisfaction, and that, before long, it may suffocate us.[12]

Here, again like Wittgenstein, Solyzhenitzyn raises the dimming and obfuscating possibilities of technological progress. On his view, we are distracted and stunted by a milieu of “superficial information and cheap spectacles” that threatens to “suffocate us” from the real air that we need to breath. I take it that Solyzhenitzyn partly has in mind that we have lost contact with a meaningful world, and that before long we will, because of our palliative distractions, cease even to have a sense of what has been lost, much like Wittgenstein’s quiet apocalypse. We are alienated and disengaged because we are distracted and manipulated by the productions of technological “progress.” This leads to a sort of spiritual vacuity by tempting us with empty self-understandings based on the shallow fantasies of popular culture and manipulative brand identities.[13] Just as Wittgenstein worries that we are seduced into fantasies such that “aeroplanes and the radio, etc. are means for closer contact” between peoples and cultures, Solyzhenitzyn claims we are spiritually reduced by distancing and distraction from what should be most intimate to us by a “whirlpool” of technologically delivered pseudo-culture and faux satisfactions.[14] In other words, the modern technological era promises us satisfaction and fulfilment, but in the end renders us alienated nomads, because it obscures our vision of the real world in which we can make our home.

            My mention of alienated homelessness brought on by the obscuring effects of the modern technological era cannot but hint at the name of Wittgenstein’s rival for the position as the most important philosopher of the twentieth century.[15] Martin Heidegger plays on this same notion of being distracted from what truly is the closest to us by what is actually quite far from us in his own cautionary pleas regarding technology:

Hourly and daily they are chained to radio and television. Week after week the movies carry them off into uncommon, but often merely common, realms of imagination, and give the illusion of a world that is no world. Picture magazines are everywhere available. All that with which modern techniques of communication stimulate, assail, and drive man – all that is already much closer to man today than his fields around his farmstead, closer than the sky over the earth, closer than the change from night to day, closer than the conventions and customs of his village, than the traditions of his native world.[16]

Russia and America, when viewed metaphysically, are both the same: the same hopeless frenzy of unchained technology and of the groundless organization of the average man. When the farthest corner of the globe has been technically conquered and can be economically exploited; when any incident you like, in any place you like, at any time you like, becomes accessible as fast as you like; when you can simultaneously “experience” an assassination attempt against a king in France and a symphony concert in Tokyo; when time is nothing but speed, instantaneity, and simultaneity, and time as history has vanished from the Dasein of all peoples; when a boxer counts as the great man of a people; when tallies of millions at mass meetings are a triumph; then, yes, there still looms a specter over all this uproar the question: what for? – where to? – what then?[17]

Heidegger, like Weber, fears that we have become alienated and disengaged from a meaningful nature and culture that can give us a non-arbitrary direction in which to point our newfound powers (“what for? – where to? – what then?”). Like Wittgenstein and Solyzhenitzyn, he believes we have been distracted by a pseudo reality and false promises of satisfaction and security by frenzied productions and organization wrought by modern innovation. For Heidegger, it is not that the object of our distraction is some sort of systematic illusion (what technology reveals is “really there”), but that it gives us the false sense of a closeness to what is actually remote (what technology reveals as “here” is really a distant “there”), which in turn causes us to miss what is right before our eyes.[18] Technological media has brought us to think of ourselves on a global or mass scale (“any place you like . . . becomes accessible”), and that obscures the actual grounding for meaning and action in our immediate surroundings, both literally in our natural environment (“the sky above the earth”) and culturally (“the traditions of his native world”).

Heidegger understood presciently that in his lifetime this process of technological de-worlding was only getting started: “What we know as the technology of film and television . . . of news reporting . . . is only a crude start . . .” and eventually “in all areas of his existence, man will be encircled ever more tightly by the forces of technology,” which will “everywhere and every minute claim, enchain, drag along, press and impose upon man under the form of some technical contrivance or other.”[19] Heidegger would not have been at all shocked to see us addicted to poking at images of distant and ultimately existentially insignificant events on our own private pocket televisions, nor any of the myriad of other ways communication technology has restructured our lives root and branch in order to draw our attention away from where we really are. We now (or soon will) occupy, according to Heidegger, a nearly collapsed space, one without significant distances, and therefore lacking of any meaningful depth (“Everything gets lumped together into uniform distancelessness”[20]), and hence “The world’s night is spreading its darkness.”[21] Heidegger, once again like Wittgenstein, became doubtful that those living in this Dark Age will be likely to understand his diagnosis before reaching the very depth of alienation.[22] Curiously, both the leading figures of twentieth-century philosophy called our attention to nihilism and obscurity as salient features of the modern technological era, while worrying that the very crisis they tried to diagnose might block us from understanding their prophetic philosophical announcements. The apocalypse they fear goes on without being noticed, as it veils itself as progress and blocks our vision of any alternative possibility.

What is it that the technological age has occluded? Is this incipient nihilism our destiny or can it be averted? For both Wittgenstein and Heidegger, technology has caused us to misunderstand ourselves by leading us to misunderstand our relationship to nature (broadly construed), and the saving hope is to recover a self-understanding that does not fall prey to these confusions. Notice that in the “Memorial Address,” from which I quoted above, Heidegger’s counterproposal to the oncoming technological domination is to recover a “meditative thinking” grounded in an organic relationship with the world we are thrown into it. This recovery of thinking is one of the central themes of Heidegger’s later thought and, I believe, can be found implicitly in his early work, though in quite different ways. As we shall see, much of what Heidegger has to offer in Being and Time is a redescription of our “thinking” as grounded in a being-in-the-world. Likewise, Wittgenstein follows his pessimistic preface with an extended dialectical meditation on the worldly conditions for the possibility of language and discursive thought – thinking. Wittgenstein famously guides us to see that our thinking (as a form of speaking) can only come online embedded in a “form of life” or in the “stream of life.” That is, both Heidegger and Wittgenstein attempt to “let the fly out of the bottle,” to adopt Wittgenstein’s famous metaphor, by asking us to rethink how we think about thinking.[23] Our technological attitude has caused us to lose a sense of what we really are as thinking beings, i.e., embodied and embedded participants in a world of practices, normative commitments, and inherited meaning. They both came to see the very opposition between mind and world as a symptom of the same virus that was driving our incipient nihilism, and they sought to overcome this problem by first addressing the manifestation of the illness by developing a thoroughly worldly philosophy of mind (though neither of them would much care for that phase as a characterization of their work). The disease itself is to be managed, even if never cured, by Wittgenstein’s and Heidegger’s suggestions that we return to the practices that allow minded beings like us to be at home in the world. This talk of a worldly philosophy of mind is not at all to suggest that either Wittgenstein or Heidegger is some sort of reductive materialist or philosophical naturalist. Rather, as is well known, both thinkers are dismissive of the dualism-materialism dichotomy as symptomatic of the very demon they are trying to exorcise. In short, Wittgenstein and Heidegger ask us to rethink our thinking under better, and they would say more originary, assumptions, so that we can recover our place in a meaningful world.

[1] T.S. Elliot, Collected Poems 1909-1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), 92.

[2] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. Anscombe, Hacker, and Schulte (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 4e. Emphasis added.

[3] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C.K. Ogden (New York: Routledge, 1995), 27.

[4] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 64.

[5] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, trans. D. Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), §132.

[6] Max Weber, “Science as Vocation,” in The Vocation Lectures, ed. D. Owen and trans. R. Livingston (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2004), 13.

[7] Ibid., 18. Author’s emphasis.

[8] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd Edition (South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1984), 26.

[9] Weber, “Science as Vocation,” 13.

[10] The nihilistic consequences of the disenchantment and disengagement originally diagnosed by Weber are thoroughly thought through by Charles Taylor throughout his mature work. For his most concise reflections in direct conversation with Weber along these lines, see The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).

[11] MacIntyre, After Virtue, 263. See also MacIntyre’s “Disquieting Suggestion,” 1-5.

[12] Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn, “We have Ceased to See the Purpose,” in the Solzhenitzyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, eds. E. Ericson and D. Mahoney (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), 595.

[13] For a recent piece of cultural criticism emphasizing the obscuring effects of technologically promulgated “pseudo-events,’ see Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (New York: Nation Books, 2009).

[14] Herbert Marcuses’ opening chapters of One Dimension Man (New York: Beacon Press, 1991) provide a similar critique of the obscuring and distracting effects of modern technologically driven media and consumerism, however different his positive social vision may be from Solyzhenitzyn’s.

[15] There are many worthy discussions of the symmetries between Wittgenstein’s and Heidegger’s thought available, but for an illuminating comparative treatment of these thinkers on the issues I am raising in this introduction, see Kevin M. Cahill, The Fate of Wonder: Wittgenstein’s Critique of Metaphysics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). Anthony Rudd offers an excellent overview of the intersection between Wittgenstein and Heidegger on the issues in philosophy of mind that I will discuss in the following chapters in Expressing the World: Skepticism, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 2003).

[16] Martin Heidegger, “The Memorial Address,” in Discourse on Thinking, trans. J. Anderson and E. Freund (New York: Harper, 1966), 48.

[17] Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. G. Fried and R. Polt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 40.

[18] Once again, notice the similarity to Wittgenstein’s “this contradicts all of my experience.”

[19] Heidegger, “Memorial Address,” 51.

[20] Martin Heidegger, ‘The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A Hofstadter (New York: Harper, 1971), 164.

[21] Martin Heidegger, “What are Poets For?” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 89.

[22] Since Heidegger will be a major contributor to our discussion in the following chapters, I should note up front, along with John Haugeland, that “Heidegger was born; he was a Nazi; he died,” Dasein Disclosed: John Haugeland’s Heidegger, ed. Joseph Rouse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 85. That is to say, we should recognize that Heidegger’s legacy is far more than a matter of academic philosophical concern and far less than admirable, but at the same time many profound insights can be excised from his hideous political commitments and his troubling reticence about those dealings after the fact. Teasing out the historical lacuna necessary to make that case is not part of what follows, and I will help myself to the safely pragmatist version of Heidegger presented by Haugeland and Herbert Dreyfus (see Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I (Medford, MA: The MIT Press, 1991). Of course, whether Heidegger can be so easily domesticated is a controversial matter. Simon Crichley is not convinced and offers a different reading of Heidegger’s philosophy that serves as a very good introduction to recent scholarship on Being and Time in his contribution to Simon Critchley and Reiner Schurmann, On Heidegger’s Being and Time, ed. Steven Levine (New York: Routledge, 2008). For a subtle and illuminating reading and ultimate rejection of Heidegger’s broader views because of their political and theological implications, see S.J. McGrath, Heidegger: A (Very) Critical Introduction (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2008). For a recent and far less subtle (and I might go so far as to say unfair – I’m not sure anyone to the right of John Rawls would avoid the accusation of Nazism by this standard) rejection of Heidegger on political grounds see Ronald Beiner, Dangerous Minds: Heidegger, Nietzsche, and the Return of the Far Right (Philadelphia, PA: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). As I am not willing to make the effort to enter this scholarly fray, I am happy to concede that the figure I am dealing with is possibly better named “Haugelandegger” or “Heidreyfus” than “Heidegger.”

[23] Heidegger does claim as he initiates one of his later inquiries into thinking that “we shall not think about what thinking is,” What is Called Thinking? tans. Peter Gray (New York: Harper, 1976), 21, but that is not to say that he refuses any thinking about thinking. What Heidegger refuses is to take thinking as an object of thought in its own right, in precision from “what is most thought-provoking.” Rather, thinking can only be thought in relation to what gives it significance, what it inclines toward and, more importantly for Heidegger, what inclines toward it. This is exactly the sort of worldly philosophy of mind I am setting out after in the following chapters.